V-2nd - Chap 8 / I have really never read this book this closely before

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Benny's attracted to the city - he's had it with those suburban labor jobs (strictly for immigrant laborers, even then, though some must have been immigrants from Jim Crow).  Love of nature arises from one's surroundings (or, possibly, as a rebellion against one's surroundings), or it's an adopted philosophical stance.  Nature took the form of mostly potato farms in the Long Island of Pynchon's youth.  The sea may have beckoned, but The Sea has meaning of its own that prevents it from being merely tossed in haphazardly as part of Nature.  Ithaca?  More farms.  The Navy?  Not a lot of nature in the ports of call.  Maybe it took an acid trip or two, along with further reading, for Pynchon to develop any sense of the one-ness with Nature, that begins to crop up in GR and expands later.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>Sent: Sep 28, 2010 9:43 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: V-2nd - Chap 8 / I have really never read this book this closely before
>
>...it's actually pretty good!
>I think Kai may be onto something - any Nature-worship in V.?  not
>sensing it; the ontology here is, what?
>the City
>the Street
>the Armed Forces
>the workplace
>the home
>History
>the (Human) self
>
>page 229 - another thing I never noticed, for some reason I always
>thought BP was on a bus with the NY Times Classified section.  But
>actually he's "on a bench in the little park behind the Public
>Library"
>which is Bryant Park? http://www.newyorkled.com/bryantpark.htm
>
>(a link on that page
>http://www.newyorkled.com/nyc_events_St_Gennaro.htm goes to the San
>Gennaro Festival although it's in September - unlike Ercole dei
>Rinoceronti in March - it's a street festival and they block off
>Mulberry Street
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_Street_%28Manhattan%29 but
>anyway...a-and it was in the Godfather...)
>
>so he's swatting flies with the paper, and staying in a flophouse
>
>"you're jobless, I'm jobless, here we both are out of work, let's screw"
>
>
>Page 230 (Harper Perennial) -
>
>"Let me call you sweetheart," they sang, all somehow on key. --
>anarchist miracle
>
>"It may have been like the bartender on upper Broadway who was nice to
>the girls and their customers."
>--- I was thinking this was page 138, but that isn't a bartender, it's
>the Hungarian Coffee Shop on York Avenue.
>Where is this bartender? Ah, here we go? page 158, "...Broadway in the
>Eighties, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken
>heart for every light on it.  Uptown was a bleak district with no
>identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as
>break: merely gets increased, tensile, compressive, shear loads piled
>on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own
>shudderings fatigue it....If they did have a customer along - usually
>one of the small gangsters around the neighborhood - the bartender
>would be as attentive and cordial as if they were young lovers, which
>in a way they were."
>
>(reaching back in order to move forward, of course: but the extended
>description of hearts not breaking but succumbing to something like
>metal fatigue, "tensile, compressive, shear loads" could apply to a
>lot of things, Benny himself not least among them; and the closing
>clause "which in a way they were" is an extension of the same
>generosity practiced by the barkeep...things that stay in Benny's
>mind, one presumes, those little acts of kindness, tiny inclusions of
>"gemeinschaft" in a larger, less-caring society)
>
>
>One gets that he's becalmed, has a little time to think, so he strings
>together some impressions and even takes it a little further in the
>following beautiful passage:
>
>"There is a way we behave around young people excited with each other,
>even if we haven't been getting any for a while and aren't likely to
>very soon.  It is a little cynical, a little self-pitying, a little
>withdrawn; but at the same time a genuine desire to see young people
>get together.  Though it springs from a self-centered concern, it is
>often as much as a young man like Profane ever does go out of himself
>and take an interest in human strangers.  Which is better, one would
>suppose, than nothing at all"
>
>
>He's playing a cool blues refrain there in Bryant Park, and the
>changes are something like
>horny (4 bars)
>jobless (4 bars)
>shared plight (4 bars)
>
>so the next paragraph modulates up chromatically and suggests (this is
>as deep philosophically as I think the book gets, at least in terms of
>breaking it down so even I can understand it) that the only valid
>reason to strive is to get laid, and that Benny qua Benny doesn't even
>crave anything besides the animate.  That is, he doesn't even think
>(our omniscient narrator assures us) about how all this craving could
>be sanely directed any other way.
>"Make love, not war" is implicit in his biogram, and his logogram
>doesn't extend to all that other stuff.
>
>Wish I could say that better.  Glad I don't need to, 'cause it's all
>right there!
>
>So of course he gets an NRB!